On May 25, 2014, at 8:32 AM, Jake <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'd like to know what people have done for node.js application deployments.
>
I have been searching up and down for something that works and am unsatisfied
with everything that I have come across. More on my travails further below.
> Coming from a compiled-language background, I'm used to compiling things,
> packing them up into some artifact, and deploying that to a server. This
> seems unnecessary in node though.
>
> A few questions on this:
> Have you seen any benefit to packing up (perhaps just a zip file) all the
> files from a node application and putting that in an artifact repository?
Yes on the first (benefit in packing up) and no on the second (putting them in
an artefact repo: in fact, it is important to me that using release tags and
tools, I should be able to recreate any build).
> Is there any reason not to just tag the source repo and copy (rsync, scp,
> etc) the files to the servers from there?
There are Git based deployment tools like Propagit/Fleet. Or even a 'git pull'
might work. However, I would like to differentiate between sources (in the
repository hierarchy that makes sense for sources) and "build"s (even if there
is no compile step). And I see no reason for each deployment to contain the Git
history of the entire repo.
> Is there any benefit to publishing the application to an internal npm
> repository and deploying from there?
I would think so, yes. To me that is a step up from deploying with Git (it
addresses the two issues I raise above), but what about other non-node
dependencies your project might have such as a DB?
At a general level, I have looked at three alternative approaches to solving
the deployment problem (for scenarios involving more than a handful of
servers): heavyweight systems like Chef/Puppet/etc, self-contained images using
LXC/Docker, and other simpler approaches like Ansible (SSH) and Propagit/Fleet
(Git). Of these, I find LXC (with or without Docker) the one most worth
pursuing. While I figure out how to move forward, here is what I am doing:
* Homegrown "build" script (much simpler and application specific than Grunt,
Gulp, etc) to create install packages (tar).
* Deployment using SSH/tar.
* Process management using PM2 and monitoring using PM2-web.
All of this is in the context of non-PaaS environments like mine (i.e., no EC2,
Heroku, etc).
--ravi
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